NVIDIA GTX 275 Review

Introduction:

It's spring time and most people are looking to get out of their houses after being cooped up inside for the winter, while others are thinking about April Fools' and what kind of weird and BS stories will be told. Well, that is not the case today with a new war being fought between nVidia and ATI with the release of their new cards. While people are looking to go outside, nVidia and ATI are looking to keep you inside for another season of game play. With the economy going the way it has, a lot more people are watching their wallets than before, so pricing vs performance is a very hot topic. Pretty much everyone knows about the battle between the nVidia GTX 260 and the ATI 4870 was a back and forth battle for top performance and pricing. Today that battle looks to heat up again with two new releases.

nVidia has been very very aggressive with its drivers by trying to offer great performance before a game is launched or on game day launch whereas ATI has not been as successful. With the launch of the GTX 275, where does it fall performance wise in nVidia's lineup and how does it stack up against ATI's latest release? Well read on to find out.

Closer Look:

The GTX 275 is a card the combines the attributes of the GTX 285 (GPU core with 240 shader processors) with the memory sub system of the GTX260 (896MB on a 448-bit bus) so essentially you have half of a GTX 295! The clock speeds on the GTX 275 come in at 633MHz on the GT200 core, 1404MHz on the shader processing cores and 1134MHz on the 896MB of memory. The card uses the reference design cooler to keep the GTX 275 alive and well.

Connectivity on the GTX 275 is via two Dual Link DVI ports. There is no other method for connecting to this card unless you use an adapter to go from the DVI to either an HDMI or D-Sub VGA port. The rear of the card is open allowing airflow in over the heatsinks on the lower circuits and discharges air through the heatsink via the port on the mounting bracket.

The GTX 275 needs two PCI-E 6-pin power connectors to supply power to the card, so a power supply with the appropriate power connectors is the best solution as using adapters is the the second and less desirable option to feed this card. Next to the power connections is the S/PDIF high definition sound input port that carries the sound from either your sound card or on-board sound solution. The GTX 275 can be used in a Tri SLI setup if multiple graphics cards are used in your system. This is the obvious upgrade path with the performance delivered by the GTX 275.

As this is a reference card there were no accessories included, so let's see what the GTX 275 has to offer.